Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Mark Fisher wringing their hands over exhaustion, the financial crisis, aesthetic resistance and the ‘slow cancellation of the future’

*These guys are two acute critics, and I totally get it about their atemporality riffing from 2013, but this very with-it discussion from just one year ago feels more than one year old to me. Not that these two gentlemen are going to get what they want from tomorrow’s cultural developments — heavens no, being leftists, they’ll be just as frustrated as ever — but the tenor of the times is changing. The era of the Twitter/Facebook street upheavals is over. It didn’t amount to much. Now it’s the top of the heap that’s gnawed by existential bafflement. It’s like watching Putin swagger around in the half-built semi-ruins of Sochi, a spectacle that cost more than ever before while delivering dangerous levels of deeply-felt humiliation.

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*In early 2014, I haven’t seen so much cognitive dissonance, and heard so much new language used, in quite a while. “When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, it means things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”

*I’m not saying that things will *improve,* mind you, and I don’t think Mark or Bifo will be dancing on tables about any of it, but the cultural and political attitude the two of them are describing here won’t last much longer. Things are going to change in large and truly peculiar ways that don’t fit within this mental wireframe of 2008-2013.

“It isn’t easy for me to answer, because you’ve put your finger on a painful wound – that is, our present theoretical impotence in the face of the de-humanizing process provoked by finance capitalism. This feels like a sort of personal defeat. But I can’t deny reality, which seems to me to be this: the last wave of the movement – say 2010 to 2011 – was an attempt to revitalize a massive subjectivity. This attempt failed: we have been unable to stop the financial aggression. The movement has now disappeared, only emerging in the form of fragmentary explosions of despair. I use the term ‘the movement’ to refer to any form of mass action which is able to change the prevailing culture and perception. This is why I don’t think that in Greece at the moment we have a movement. It is only a despairing reaction to the devastation – it is reactive and isolated.

“We should be able to produce a theoretical model which assumes that the form of subjectivation that we used to know is now over. The mutation that has infested the post-alphabetical generation – that is, the first generation to learn more words from the machine than from the mother – has deeply eroded the ability to solidarize. A process of social recomposition of precarious labour seems impossible, at least in the form of collective action, political solidarity and class consciousness. I really don’t know if that means that my generation is unable to see the new process of social composition that will one day give the new generation the opportunity to free themselves from fear and loneliness.

“Mouffe writes that ‘various modes of artivist intervention influenced by the Situationist strategy of détournement like The Yes Men are very effective in disrupting the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to impose, bringing to the fore its repressive character’. This may be true, but the unveiling of the repressive character of power is not going to bring about rebellion. On the contrary, it only reinforces a sense of impotence. The techniques of subversion have been quite efficient in ‘revealing’ the true nature of financial capitalism, but consciousness of what is real is not class consciousness. It isn’t enough to only see the danger – you also need to be able to escape it or to dispel it. The majority of people hate finance capitalism but, as far as I can see, this hatred is turning into depression rather than into autonomy.

“Mouffe adds: ‘One could also mention a variety of urban struggles like “Reclaim the streets” in Britain, the “Tute Bianche” in Italy, the “Stop Advertising” campaigns in France or the “Nike Ground-Rethinking Space” in Vienna – there exist a great variety of types of artistico-activist practices and of modes of communication-guerrilla.’ In the last 15 years, however, activism has been totally unable to stop the systematic offensive of corporations and financial agencies. Look at the last wave of struggles against the financial dictatorship, from UK Uncut to the Spanish acampada to Occupy Wall Street. This wave of movements has produced an effect of widespread awareness among the majority of the population, but it hasn’t slowed the dismantling of social life.

“Not only is political activism unable to change the reality of finance capitalism, but the mainstream political parties cannot do anything if they do not follow the automatisms of power. Look at Barack Obama’s failure to change the American distribution of wealth, notwithstanding the huge support that he gathered in 2008. ‘Yes We Can’ turned swiftly into derision when he was obliged to bend to the force of financial power. I think that autonomy is only possible when people become able to change their daily lives – by breaking the links of dependence on consumerism and exploitation, for instance. In the last two or three years, however, I’ve started to believe that this precarious generation is unable to start a process of autonomization. This is because of a sort of psychic frailty produced by precariousness, competition and loneliness.

MARK FISHER

“That is a very moving and honest answer, but I actually think you highlight the strengths of Mouffe’s position. Those strengths have, I think, to do with political strategies, rather than aesthetic ones. Mouffe’s examples of subversive or counter-hegemonic art were very unconvincing – the strategies of détournement she referred to have long since been incorporated by capital. Nothing sells better than anti-capitalism – look at the way corporations are depicted in Hollywood films such as Wall E [2008] and Avatar [2009]. It’s asking too much of art or culture to expect it to provide resources for overcoming the decomposition of solidarity that you so acutely describe. Art and culture are themselves the victims of this decomposition. Under post-Fordist working practices, neo-liberal ideology and communicative capitalism, social imagination struggles to find the time to grow. The current austerity programme in the UK – with its attacks on social housing, welfare benefits, squatting and higher-education funding – will make the unpressured time in which social imagination could develop even scarcer.

“It’s not that the rise of finance capital is unstoppable, it’s that the strategies that the movement has deployed against it are not the right ones – it is easy for capital to route around them. Which is not to say that important things have not happened in the last decade or so: the wave of insurrection in the Middle East in 2011, for instance, showed that the so-called end of history is now over. But an intelligent system needs to learn from its failures, not keep repeating them. As David Harvey has said, we shouldn’t fetishize particular organizational forms. Rather, we need to do what neo-liberalism has done, and use an ensemble of different strategies….”